WEIR
Get a key
Theme

X (Twitter) API Pricing in 2026: Every Rate and What It Really Costs

X API pricing as of October 2026: every pay-per-use read and write rate, the 3M post-read cap, starter credits, and the real cost of common jobs.

By Tarun Khatri · · 9 min read

X API pricing in 2026 is pay-per-use: you buy credits up front and each request deducts a fixed price per resource, with reading a post costing $0.005 and reading a user or follower record $0.010, as of October 2026. There is no free tier for new apps and no monthly subscription, and post reads are capped at 3 million per billing cycle before you need an Enterprise contract. The rest of this post lists every published rate, explains the 24-hour deduplication rule and starter credits, and works through what realistic jobs actually cost.

TL;DR: the numbers that matter

Item Price (as of October 2026)
Read a post $0.005 ($5 per 1,000)
Read a user profile $0.010 ($10 per 1,000)
Read a follower or following record $0.010 ($10 per 1,000)
Read your own app's data ("owned reads") $0.001 per resource
Create a post $0.015
Create a post containing a URL $0.200
Monthly post-read cap 3,000,000 per billing cycle
Deduplication Same resource within one UTC day is charged once
Starter credits $20 after your first purchase, plus first auto-recharge matched up to $50

All of these come from X's own pricing page, which also says "prices are subject to change" and points to the Developer Console for live rates.

How X API pricing works now

X officially launched pay-per-use on February 6, 2026. Per X's docs, billing is tracked per app, you buy credits in advance, and requests fail once the balance runs out. There are no monthly minimums, and failed requests are not billed.

The same announcement thread noted that only "for-good Public Utility apps" keep free scaled access, and that recently active users of the old Free tier were moved to pay-per-use with a one-time $10 voucher.

Two controls are worth setting on day one: a spending limit per billing cycle, after which requests are blocked, and auto-recharge, which tops up your balance when it falls below a threshold. X caps auto-recharge at one top-up per five-minute window, so bursty jobs can still hit "out of credits" errors if the recharge amount is too small.

Read rates

Reads are billed per resource returned, not per request. A search that returns 100 posts costs 100 x $0.005 = $0.50.

Resource Price per resource
Posts $0.005
Users $0.010
Following / followers $0.010
DM events $0.010
Lists, Spaces, Communities, Notes $0.005
Profile updates $0.005
Likes, mutes, blocks $0.001
Owned reads (your own posts, followers, bookmarks, lists) $0.001

Owned reads are the bargain: when the {id} in the request is the authenticated user who owns the app, posts, mentions, followers and similar endpoints cost $0.001 per resource. That makes the official API cheap for analytics on your own account and expensive for everyone else's.

Write rates

Writes are billed per request.

Action Price per request
Create a post $0.015
Create a post with a URL $0.200
Create a post (summoned reply) $0.010
Create a DM interaction $0.015
Create a user interaction $0.015
Delete an interaction $0.010
Create a List $0.010
Manage a List, bookmark, content manage, media metadata $0.005
Post counts (recent / full archive) $0.005 / $0.010
Trends $0.010

The line that surprises people is the post with a URL: at $0.20 it costs more than thirteen plain posts. A bot that shares one link a day pays about $6 a month in link posts alone.

X also bills webhook events from its X Activity API per delivered event, from $0.001 (mutes, blocks) to $0.010 (follows, DMs), with some events, such as post deletions, not billed.

The 3 million post-read cap

Pay-per-use accounts are capped at 3 million post reads per monthly billing cycle. Above that, X directs you to Enterprise, which has custom pricing.

At $0.005 per post, hitting the cap costs 3,000,000 x $0.005 = $15,000 in one month. Most teams never get close, but if you are building a firehose-style product, plan for the Enterprise conversation early.

The cap counts posts returned from search (recent and full archive), post lookup, filtered stream, user timelines, mentions, liked posts, bookmarks, List posts, and Spaces lookup.

Deduplication: the 24-hour window

X deduplicates billed resources within a 24-hour window that resets at midnight UTC. If two of your queries return the same post on the same UTC day, you pay for it once; if you fetch it again the next day, you pay again.

X calls this a "soft guarantee" that may not hold in edge cases such as outages, so don't build a budget that depends on it. In practice it helps most when overlapping keyword searches return the same viral posts. It does not help with a job that reads new content every day, because new content is new resources.

Starter credits and other incentives

As of October 2026, X's free-credits page lists two incentives for new pay-per-use accounts, which X also announced on October 2:

  • $20 once your account completes its first credit purchase with an eligible credit or debit card. Since an update on October 13, 2026, saving a card alone no longer qualifies.
  • Your first successful auto-recharge matched, up to $50.

Together that is up to $70. These free credits are spent before purchased ones and expire three months after they are granted. Prepaid cards don't qualify, and each physical card can earn each incentive once.

Separately, if you link an xAI team, X grants free xAI API credits of 10% to 20% of your cumulative spend once it passes $200 in a billing cycle.

What happened to Free, Basic and Pro

  • Free: ended for new developers with the February 2026 launch. Only Public Utility apps keep free access.
  • Basic was $200 a month after X doubled it from $100 in October 2024, with 15,000 post reads a month. X announced on May 21, 2026 that legacy Basic plans, monthly and annual, would be migrated automatically to pay-per-use after June 1, 2026.
  • Pro was $5,000 a month and, per TechCrunch, allowed 1 million post reads a month plus full-archive search. Some third-party guides say Pro subscribers are also being moved to pay-per-use after September 1, 2026. We could not find that in X's own docs or posts, so treat it as unconfirmed.

Full-archive search, once a Pro and Enterprise feature, is now available to pay-per-use customers, at up to 500 posts per request. Recent search covers the last 7 days.

Worked examples: what real jobs cost

These estimates use X's published rates and assume no deduplication savings. Your volumes will differ, so swap in your own numbers.

Tracking 10 keywords

Say each of 10 keywords matches about 200 new posts a day, so you read 2,000 posts a day, or 60,000 a month.

60,000 posts x $0.005 = $300 per month

If you poll with since_id so each request only returns new posts, deduplication saves you nothing, because every post you're billed for is new.

Pulling the followers of 1,000 accounts

Say the accounts average 2,000 followers each, so you're reading 2,000,000 follower records.

2,000,000 records x $0.010 = $20,000

Accounts that appear in several follower lists on the same UTC day may be billed once, so overlap reduces this a little. It also has to fit X's rate limit of 300 follower requests per 15 minutes.

A dashboard reading 100,000 posts a month

100,000 posts x $0.005 = $500 per month

A bot posting three times a day

90 posts x $0.015 = $1.35 per month
90 posts with links x $0.200 = $18.00 per month

Writing is cheap and reading other people's data is expensive. That's the shape of X's price list.

Buying the same data elsewhere

If you only need to read public data, third-party APIs charge far less per result. We run one of them, Weir, so weigh our numbers with that in mind. The arithmetic below uses our published packs. A call costs 1 credit, plus 1 credit per X post, 1 per account in a follower page and 2 per profile. Packs range from $5 for 25,000 credits ($0.20 per 1,000) to $1,000 for 10,000,000 ($0.10 per 1,000), plus 5,000 free credits every month.

Tracking 10 keywords on Weir. Polling each keyword hourly is 10 x 24 x 30 = 7,200 calls a month. At roughly 8 new posts per keyword-hour, each call fits in one page.

7,200 call minimums + 60,000 posts = 67,200 credits
67,200 - 5,000 free = 62,200 credits x ($20 / 120,000) = about $10.37

1,000 accounts' followers on Weir. X serves about 70 followers per page, so 2,000 followers is 29 pages per account, plus a 2-credit profile lookup on the first page.

2,000,000 accounts + 29,000 call minimums + 2,000 profile credits = 2,031,000 credits
At the $1,000 pack rate ($0.10 per 1,000): about $203
At the $200 pack rate ($0.125 per 1,000): about $254

That is about 1% of the official API's $20,000. But we aren't the cheapest option here. TwitterAPI.io's pricing charges 1 credit ($0.00001) per follower when you fetch 200 at a time, so the same 2 million records cost about $20 there. We compare the options fairly in the best Twitter API alternatives.

When the official API is the right answer:

  • You need to write: post, reply, DM, like or follow. Third-party read APIs like ours can't do this.
  • You're reading your own account's data, where owned reads cost $0.001 each.
  • You need X's official terms, compliance endpoints, post counts, trends, or the Activity API's webhooks.
  • You're at Enterprise scale and want a contract with X itself.

Third-party services are not X, and each has its own terms. Whether a given use of public X data is appropriate for your project is a question for your own counsel, not a pricing table.

Doing it with Weir

If reading public posts, profiles and followers is all you need, you can try it on the free monthly credits without a card. A keyword search is one call:

curl https://api.weirapp.io/v1/x/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEIR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "pricing", "fromUsers": ["XDevelopers"], "limit": 5}'

Each response reports what it charged in the x-credits-charged header, and the cursor for the next page is in meta.nextCursor. For recurring watches, a monitor re-runs the query on a schedule and charges only for new results. Sign up here, or start with the quickstart.

Sources

Keep reading